The first diagram is one year’s worth of statistics, showing the daily and monthly average of concurrent Sansar users. There is a noticable spike in users around the time of the Steam launch on both graphs:

Gindipple also shared the following graph, saying:

Of particular interest is this graph that shows the last 2 weeks. The spikes are the comedy event and a product meetup.

The news from both sets of graphs is about the same. Both show a noticeable spike in Sansar usage due to the Steam launch, but unfortunately, many of those users did not seem to stick around. However, there does seem to be a small uptick in the total number of simultaneous Sansar users overall, comparing the periods before and after the Steam launch.

Also, both Galen’s and Gindipple’s statistics show that Sansar is now hitting up to 80 concurrent users at a time, mostly due to events such as the stand-up comedy series. This is a definite improvement, although I’m quite sure that Linden Lab wants much higher numbers than that.

So, the struggle continues. And Linden Lab is far from alone in trying to figure out the magic formula that will bring users in—and make them come back. The only social VR platform which is still consistently packing the users in is VRChat (with Rec Room a distant second).

Linden Lab has released a Second Life End-of-Year Update, outlining some of the achievements and events of 2018, and things are looking pretty good overall.

They shared some statistics on user concurrency, which show that it has remained steady over the past two years. It’s not increasing, but it’s not going down, either, which is encouraging:

As the year comes to a close, we’ve rounded up some interesting statistics to share insight into how the Second Life community is spending its time and money.

One thing is clear: Second Lifers were a busy bunch in 2018. You spent an estimated 336 million hours inworld in the past year alone! And there are 50 million+ chat messages daily.

Our daily concurrency rates remain stable, too. Take a look at this chart, which shows the overall traffic trends on logged in Second Life users over the past two years.

Pictured: Second Life concurrency rates from early 2017 to late 2018.

Also, They shared some stats about sales this year, and they’re pretty good too:

This active population helped keep the Second Life economy healthy in 2018. Approximately $65 million was paid out to Residents in the past year for a variety of items and services. On the Marketplace, there are currently over 5 million virtual goods for sale. Since we lowered prices on the Mainland and maintenance fees on Private Estates, we’ve seen some growth in the overall land market as well. For example, we saw increases across the board in land ownership – more Region owners, more parcel owners, more group-owned land, more Regions on the Grid. As many owners traded up from Openspaces and Homesteads to full Regions to take full advantage of the lower pricing, we saw growth in overall SQM owned by Residents.

There has been much discussion and sometimes heated debate, both here and on other blogs, about the actual level of usage of Sansar, how to measure that usage best, and what those statistics mean. Galen, who is a very talented programmer who builds and sells scripts under the brand name Metaverse Machines, has put together a useful and informative new webpage gathering together various Sansar statistics. Let’s take a look at what he has given us.

First is a list of current statistics:

The number of Sansar experiences listed in the Atlas

How many people are in how many experiences right now

The peak (and average) number of people in Sansar today

How many Sansar experiences have been visited in the past 3 hours

How many experiences were visited today

How many experiences were visited this month

Galen also lists the four most active Sansar experiences right now, with some statistics for each:

Finally, he presents charts of daily, weekly, and monthly public visitors to Sansar, showing both peak and average numbers, as well as a chart of the number of Sansar experiences built over time:

Galen explains the data in the charts:

The following charts come from data collected using a publicly available API. We take a snapshot of all currently listed experiences and how many people are in them approximately every 10 minutes. The “peak” lines represent the highest concurrent head-count across all experiences measured in those snapshots across the whole day (or week). The averages are computed by adding up the total head-count measures for each day (or week) and dividing by the number of snapshots. The gaps between each snapshot make this data imperfect but very solid. To avoid visual confusion, today’s data is excluded.

Not too long ago, I shared recent Sansar user concurrency statistics from Gindipple. Gindipple’s figures have sparked a bit of controversy and debate, about what they actually portray. Some have taken away the “fact” that there are never more than 20 people in Sansar at any one time, which is an incorrect interpretation of the data.

Today, I want to share with you another set of user statistics, this one compiled by Galen, who scraped data automatically from the Sansar Atlas in much the same way as Gindipple does. (Galen may be sampling the data more or less often than Gindipple; I didn’t ask either of them how often they sampled the data in the Atlas.)

Galen’s first chart shows minimum(blue line), average(red line) and maximum(yellow line) user concurrency over the past three months (please click on this image to see it in its full size):

Galen says:

…Average concurrency is not what most people care about. They typically care about peak concurrency. And average peak concurrency.

The maximum concurrency values from day to day are more like 20 – 30, even if my calculation of average concurrency hovers around 10. That number is useful but confusing.

And then from week to week, here’s what we see:

Once again, please click on the image below to see it in full size:

Galen adds:

See how the peaks are averaging 30 – 40? That literally means that during each week, there are 30 – 50 people in all experiences at one time for at least one snapshot of time I took during that week. The averages are very interesting, but harder for most people to make sense of.